Limerick, Ireland
David Phillips & Paul Rowley, Microfiche Diamond Trade, 2004, single-channel video installation with sound, 4 minutes

David Phillips & Paul Rowley

b. 1970, USA

Working primarily with film, video installation, and sound, our work investigates narratives of containment, the processes through which perceptions of experience become altered and rewritten with fictions of social order. Our intent is to build self-contained works with a condensed, immersive aesthetic. Archival footage selections are digitally altered and combined with new material that is created in response to these found fragments. Time is heavily manipulated, with certain areas within the frame moving at different velocities to areas around them. Often referencing film soundtrack composition, the sound design for each work is composed from original scoring, field recordings, and archival elements. Image and sound interact to create isolated systems within which aesthetic and sociological elements can be examined. Works often focus on specific characters, individuals who find themselves displaced or between actions. As characters within genre narratives have certain restricted options as to how they can behave, the individuals in these works seem similarly constrained by the limits of the systems into which they are placed. The works’ slightly eerie sense of the familiar draws the viewer into personal exchanges with these characters as we observe their dislocation and disconnectedness.

(Text: OPEN e v + a catalogue, 2005)

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